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2020 Pro Football Hall of Fame Class

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Della9250, Aug 2, 2019.

  1. Della9250

    Della9250 Well-Known Member

    Missed this over the weekend

    The 15 selections will automatically be inducted -- there is no vote by the regular committee. The feeling is that since the vote was yes on all and no on all, it could fail so this eliminates that possibility

    Hall of Fame makes dramatic change to the rules for the 15-person centennial mega-class

    And Peter King's thoughts from his FMIA column

    FMIA Week 9: ‘Lamar The Dude’ As Ravens Topple Pats, Shifting The NFL Landscape At Season’s Halfway Point

    1. I think I have some follow-up thoughts on the decision of the Pro Football Hall of Fame to alter the selection process for the class of 2020. The Hall will have a specially appointed committee of 25 people—13 regular Hall of Fame selectors, 12 mostly high-profile NFL names (Bill Belichick, John Madden, Ozzie Newsome, Ron Wolf among them)—choosing the class of 15. This appointed committee will winnow a list of more than 200 down to 10 contributors, two coaches and three contributors … and they’re into Canton. (I am a Hall of Fame voter. I am not on the 25-member special voting committee for the Centennial Class.) Three thoughts:

    The Hall originally planned to have the regular, 48-person selection committee vote on the 15-man Centennial Class as a bloc. I don’t know this, but I am reasonably sure the Hall changed course since August because it realized that it was conceivable that the class could be voted down, and there would be no Centennial Class. As a selector, I’d have voted no if there was one person on the list of 15 whose candidacy I firmly opposed. The class would have required an 80 percent yes vote to pass. So if 10 or more of the 48 selectors voted no, all 15 would have been out. I proposed, as did some of my peers on the committee, that the 48 selectors be allowed to vote on the 15 one-by-one, but the Hall said no, thinking it unwieldy. The meeting would have been a marathon session, or broken into two meetings because there would be 15 Centennial Class candidates to consider, plus the normal 15 modern-era candidate to whittle to five. So the Hall chose a different selection process, to ensure there’d be a Centennial Class.

    Originally, the plan for the class was to enshrine most if not all of the 15 from the early years of pro football—say, the first 35 years, pre-1958 Colts-Giants title game. “With 100 years of history behind us,” Hall president David Baker said in August, “there’s a belief … that there are so many deserving seniors that might have fallen between the cracks.” I hope, fervently, that overlooked founders and players are those who get most of the slots, and the group of 15 comes from 1920-60. What I fear, with the intense lobbying for players and coaches and contributors from the modern era, is the committee will be bombarded with pleas for those newer candidates, and swayed. It’s altogether wrong to open the door wider for men who have played and worked in the game in the last 50 years, whose cases get considered every year. This class should be for the forgotten cornerstones of the game from, particularly, the first quarter-century of the pro game. How will this process ensure that the early years of the league get the attention the Centennial Class was designed to address?

    The process may favor some markets and franchises. The Cardinals (Chicago/St. Louis/Arizona), playing since the birth of the league in 1920, do not have a voter with ties to the franchise. Nor does the franchise birthed in Boston in 1932 and moved to Washington in 1937 by owner George Preston Marshall. Oakland, by comparison, has three voters with ties to the team: a former beat writer (Frank Cooney), a Hall of Fame coach (John Madden) and 12-year scout from the glory years (Ron Wolf). Is it fair for one franchise in its 60th year to have three representatives, and a franchise in its 100th to have none?

    We can all have different opinions on this. I’m sure many of you disagree with my take. I truly hope the committee of 25 selects the 15 Hall of Famers in the spirit in which the Centennial Class was drawn up: to pay tribute to the those who played in Canton and Pottsville and Frankford, who founded the league in an auto showroom in Ohio, and who coached and managed teams that were largely town teams in places like Green Bay and Canton. Men most have never heard of, or know next-to-nothing about, they’re the ones who deserve to live forever, in bronze. If they are not honored now, at the time of the 100th anniversary of pro football in 2020, they’ll be forgotten forever.

    2. I think the logical question is: Okay, who? Who deserves to be in? Who should this Centennial Class recognize?

    • Ralph Hay, who, as an auto dealer and owner of the Canton Bulldogs in 1920, signed Jim Thorpe, then organized a meeting to form the first pro football league ever in 1920; that league morphed into the NFL in 1922. Hay’s Bulldogs won the first NFL title in 1922, then won it again in 1923.

    • Al Wistert, all-decade player of the ‘40s, eight-time all-pro two-way lineman for the Eagles, and key to their championship teams of 1948 and ’49. He was the best blocker in Steve Van Buren’s four seasons winning the rushing title.

    • Lavvie Dilweg, all-decade player of the ‘20s for Green Bay, and considered the best all-around end in the game prior to Don Hutson.

    • Buddy Parker, a key running back as a rookie in 1935 helping the Lions win their first NFL title. Later he coached Detroit to two straight NFL titles, beating the mighty Browns (with coach Paul Brown and quarterback Otto Graham) in 1952 and 1953.

    Forgotten, all of them.

    3. I think many of you will skip over that stuff, and I get it. You don’t know them. I never knew them either. But think how huge this game is today, with 17 million people watching the average game, and then think how many people had to work for years and years to make it happen, and then ask: Shouldn’t we recognize the greatest players and coaches and contributors who allowed all of this to happen? We’ll figure out the modern guys, and maybe two or four who deserve to be in will be snubbed for a few years, or forever. I just don’t want the tens of viable candidates to disappear forever. That’s why the work of this committee of 25 must be done with the gravitas of respecting the relatively ancient history of pro football.
     
    maumann, CD Boogie and cyclingwriter2 like this.
  2. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    Food for thought:

    Player A: 165 starts, 32,942 yards, 165 TD, 141 INT, 81.6 QB rating
    Player B: 125 starts, 27,602 yards, 154 TD, 113 INT, 80.4 QB rating

    One is in Canton, one is nowhere close. Both contemporaries.
     
  3. Della9250

    Della9250 Well-Known Member

    Well one won three Super Bowls and the second was a pain in the ass who went 1-2 in the postseason
     
  4. cyclingwriter2

    cyclingwriter2 Well-Known Member

    Player A shouldn’t be in the Hall either if we went just by counting stats.
     
    3_Octave_Fart likes this.
  5. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    Player A: Troy Aikman
    Player B: Jeff George
     
    cyclingwriter2 likes this.
  6. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    To repeat what I've said on so many HoF threads I'm sick of it but I can't stop because the concept drives me mad, there are many more aspects to what makes a Hall of Famer than counting stats and those who use them should acknowledge that. In a column I did 25 years ago I did a blind stat line for a ballplayer that by itself would have made him a very very marginal choice for Cooperstown. His name was Jackie Robinson.
     
    maumann and 3_Octave_Fart like this.
  7. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    It's also illustrative of surrounding talent and selective bias.
    Aikman's strength was his accuracy and Y/A, both purposefully omitted from that side-by-side to show how the numbers are fucked with to reach a prescribed conclusion.
     
    cyclingwriter2 likes this.
  8. cyclingwriter2

    cyclingwriter2 Well-Known Member

    This is an interesting convo. It’s worth pointing out that Aikman didn’t have to put up big numbers for his team to win. George had to carry that load, and usually failed at it. He played 12 seasons, but 100 of his 154 touchdowns came in just four years.
     
    Last edited: Nov 17, 2019
  9. Della9250

    Della9250 Well-Known Member

    There's also the point that Player A was teammates with a guy who is the all-time leading rusher, so the chance to throw for more yards was negated by the most successful runner
     
  10. maumann

    maumann Well-Known Member

    What @Della9250 argues earlier in this thread is the same opinion I had when NASCAR decided to start its own Hall of Fame: Create a place where today's fans could learn about the forgotten names and faces of the people who founded the sport 70 years ago through the formation of Winston Cup and the Modern Era.

    But when I asked about why so many names were being left off the ballot, the head NASCAR PR guy bluntly put it: "Nobody's going to pay money to watch five dead people get inducted every year."

    So it's a Hall of Popularity.
     
  11. Della9250

    Della9250 Well-Known Member

    I think what the Baseball Hall is doing now makes a lot of sense -- they cut back on the pre 1950 candidates to once a decade and are focusing on the deserving recent ones.

    Football is harder because they only allow the one or two candidates per year and it leaves more of a chance worthy guys will pass away in the meantime. The fact they are doing the centennial class to get a lot of them done, depending on who actually makes the cut, should be applauded. But you can tell the current system is geared towards candidates that are still alive or are alive when they are at least picked to be a candidate. They haven't recently said -- this guy from the 40s is going to be the Senior nominee
     
  12. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    I thought it was getting better. Then Don Coryell kept not getting in and I realized fully that many of the voters don't understand football history.
     
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